Vice President, Dr Mahamudu Bawumia says plans are underway to ensure that all Ghanaians with SIM cards re-register them using the National Identification card by the middle of this year.
According to him, this is part of plans to rid the country’s cyberspace of fraud.
Speaking at the 5th Ghana CEO Summit which is underway in Accra, the Vice President noted that any individual who fails to take part in the exercise risks losing his or her SIM card.
“I expect that the Minister for Communications and Digitalization [Ursula Owusu Ekuful] will soon announce the date for registration of the SIM card. Maybe by the end of June or beginning of July this year, everybody will have to register their SIM with a National ID number.”
“We all have to do that otherwise we’ll lose that SIM card. That will really give us a real identity for all MoMo transactions. For example, it takes away fraud that is taking place like SIM box and through MoMo”, he added.
Furthermore, the Vice President said “we’re also digitising the Births and Death Registry; the digitization is 80% complete. What we are putting in place is a system, so that from next year when a child is born within a month, each child will be given a unique National ID number.”
Dr Mahamudu Bawumia also expressed the government’s commitment to rebuilding a resilient economy through policy response and strategies.
According to him, the country will achieve this through digitisation of the economy which will trigger more revenue growth and expansion of the economy.
“We have to move into a new economy because it is going to provide a single source of truth and a unique identity for all transactions across the spectrum. And so this year, what we’ve been doing since we came into office has been the integration of the national ID card database with other key databases.
“We’ve integrated it with SSNIT, we’ve integrated with GRA. And with GRA, for example, up to 2016, TIN numbers in Ghana were 750,000. By making the TIN number our national ID number, we’ve immediately increased it from 750,000 to 15.5 million as of now.
